Confessions of a Fuck-Up Artist!

My head's not on straight these last few days. It rarely is after she heads back to Andalusia... ("I am un chien"). Rage fills her absence and in return I fill the roads Racer X style. I bury it down on the page, cast it out with LBRs and 5 mile burns on the Y's stair-climber. It works for a little bit but I still got this tiny Dalek in my skull shouting - "SUBLIMATE!" - while a miniaturized tiger in my balls crouches anxious for the kill. It's alright, weed numbs the sex drive and I'm cool so long as I stay away from lick-her, I mean... wish-key, I mean... drinking.

Cool story bro, I hear some of you spit before rolling your eyes venomously, so let me drop another before working you back into the first one.

I'm sitting with the Princess's gal pal breaking my rule about rolling sans Jamie's but the fuck else am I gonna do in the Yacht when I got no work the next day? I promise myself to only stick to three and since the Princess is buying that's an easy oath to stick to. Except three drinks is exactly enough to shift me from diplomatically quiet to asshole if done under the space of two hours and especially without any Write Clubbers or Drac Packers around to keep me in check.

Meanwhile the Gal Pal is having a moan. Sitrep as follows. Some pretty boy with great abs and zero game in the sack is giving her static about her not letting him move in after three dates with one lame lay in between. Worst of all he keeps dropping passive aggressive hints about how she needs to lose weight or go light on the side of fries with dinner or hit the gym with him. She doesn't know what to do with this cat who sounds like a real class act but she's not really talking to me but rather the Princess and that's fine.

Normally.

But I'm drinking with my head not on straight.

So I jump into a conversation I'm not really invited to and drop my best Rust Cohle impression.

"You mean to tell me with all that pussy you sling you don't know the difference between 'Misogynistic dick' and 'Regular dick' by now?"

"Excuse me?" Gal Pal gasps with blue eyes shock wide as the Princess covers her face in embarrassment.

"I mean I get it," I continue nonplussed, "Misogynistic Dick can come with some awesome times and more O's than Elizabethean poetry but like its sister, Crazy Pussy you gotta pay to play - with your wallet, with your self-esteem, with your future sometimes. If you're not willing to pay that price or that Misogynistic Dick comes up too short, too quick... then the only conversation you need to be having is how this dude's someone else's problem now."

"Are you finished?" Gal Pal huffs.

"I am unless someone's buying me another round."

Gal Pal says she's buying. When the waitress comes by with my Jamie Gal Pal snatches it off the tray before I can take it and splashes it in my face.

"What were you thinking?" Princess asks as I wipe the bourbon from my eyes.

"Come again?" I say.

"What do you think?" Princess repeats back in the real world where I'm dry and haven't said a word in something like the last fifteen minutes. "Should she let him move in or wait for an apology?"

"Fuck him." I say finishing drink #3, leaving it to them whether or not my answer was meant literally or figuratively.

"Fuck him." Chakra Panties tells me the next day while at the Y. She's a lean slice of pound cake who I caught at the gym in this violet bikini with a red chakra emblazoned across the mons pubis. Hence the name. Her answer came when I inquired about her boyfriend, the Tofu Neanderthal.

"Shit, what happened?" I ask hovering over her on the weight bench where I'm giving her a spot that she don't really need.

"I had to kick the asshole out of my apartment." She says pumping an impressive 205 (counting the bar). "He was giving me zero dick along with zero rent. I'm just trying to burn off a little frustration, y'know?"

The tiger in my balls growls, my Swadisthana flares up bright as freshly charged Green Lantern Ring, and the tiny Dalek in my head shrieks - 'Sublimate! Sublimate! Sublimate!'.

"Yeah... I know." And I take 205 pounds of dead steel in my hands, toss it to the side with super human strength, step around the bench upon which she still lies watching me with sweat soaked and open mouthed wonder. I straddle over her. Take her wrists and press them to the arms of the bench. From lips to nape I work the kiss down slow. 14 chakras fire up and our skin goes translucent luminal like in an Alex Grey painting. Around us the Gym Queens and Soccer Moms and Living He-Man dolls form a circle around us holding hands while chanting - "Feel the Burn! Feel the Burn! Feel the Burn!"

And I grin to this watching world I love to strip my psyche bare before and ask how's my confidence now?, mother-fuckers.

"Your turn." Chakra Panties says finishing a solid set of ten of reps.

"I'm good." I tell her unable to meet those narrow hazel eyes staring up at me. "I'm gotta get back home and get some work done."

"Pussy." She laughs playfully.

"Don't be a dick." I wink and make my way to a cold shower surrounded by sweaty old men in a locker room. There, slowly, my head begins to screw back on a little tighter and I remember I'm one more day closer to being back with my Baby.

It was after midnight when Kid Hemingway and I got Viceroy's text. "PK and I at Ponce City Market". A quick ride in the Kid's Skamobile and we arrived at the loft gutted corpse of City Hall East. We circled around a series of parking lots looking for a bar that wasn't there. Tried calling the Vice up direct and got five rings deep followed by the wail of ten-thousand ghosts floating in a void of static before a lone beep signaled me to leave a message. Called PK instead. Three rings and he answered frantic.

I told him we were here.

He asked where, frantic and distracted.

When I elaborated he thanked Jesus and told us to park on the Ponce side. He would be down in a minute and explain everything. Before I could say another word he hung up and I pass along the instructions.

Five minutes later and we're in an efficiency that, through the black arts of branding and the necromantic chant - "Location! Location! Location!", had been miraculously transformed into a 'flat'.

"'Flat'?" The Kid huffs through a beard as thick as your dad's old GI Joe dolls, "Like we're in Merry Old Fucking England all of a sudden."

It's a narrow hallway eight strides long before we walk into a kitchen/living room with a wall of windows looking out over the flow of Ponce De Leon. It only takes the Kid and I a single glance before we register the SitRep. It's a cocaine soirée hosted by a flock of Millennials who we find out later all work in advertising with the ambiguous titles of - "Client Strategist" and "Vision Guy". None of them offer us any blow. None of them offer us a beer. None of them even offer a hello. Which is odd as for all they know the Kid and I are Red Dog 5-0 rolling undercover. Instead they're all either huddled over a coke dusted plate on the oven burner or sprawled out on a couch in front of a flat-screen television that's locked on a stream service menu screen while they cycle through their smartphones.

Slumped on a stool by the window with a burnt out cigarette dangling forgotten from his fingers, Vice barely registers us with a glance of dead eyes burning through strands of long auburn hair. Above him, circling in a halo loop around his thoughts, a mechanical bird fluttered. The bird was the size of Vice's fist. It's torso was a miniature typewriter, it's wings were folded pages torn from secret journals, and in place of a head a falcon's skull shrieked.

When it did none of our hosts seemed to notice. They continued to chop lines or thumb tap away into a series of tiny screens.

It was Vice's heart, PK informed us, and it had burst free out from its host when it heard the news about yet another beloved watering hole being bulldozed to make way for another slab of mixed use duplex hell. It had been floating around him shrieking all day. Nothing could silence it. Not the company of kindred souls, not contemplative sips of beer, not the enticements of white insect heat coke.

The typewriter keys on the mechanical bird that was Vice's heart began depressing themselves in a machine gun chatter before a tiny little page feather dropped from its ass. Quicker on the draw than your correspondent, the Kid snatched the page mid-air and with a squint at the tiny text reads from it.

"You guys, I don't know what to do. Seriously. Look outside. They're tearing down this city we love and putting up bullshit in its place. And there's no escape. Even if we move to another city it's all the same. Look at what they did to New York. Times Square looks like Blade Runner as reimagined as a Disneyland ride. LA-LA Land, Chi, and even old Rome Town. They're making every city look like each other so that the people who live in them will eventually be the same. They're turning our holy grounds into strip malls and the ghosts of Ginsberg's "Visionary Indian Angels" are laughing at us through their tears. Meanwhile all we can do is..."

And the Kid explained that that's all it said... ellipses and everything.

"Nothing." Vice whispered finishing the sentence.

Above us the mechanical bird shrieked once in agreeance.

We need to get his heart back in him before it just flies away, PK told us but as to how he had no idea.

Shit, I figured with the wisdom of three glasses of Irish whiskey that fueled me up before our arrival, why don't I just grab it and give it to Vice to shove back in any way that he pleases.

But when I tried all I got was a snap of bone mandible to the fingers and a laugh from the Kid.

The Kid had a different idea. He pulled up on his phone some words of wisdom from Saint Hunter to lure or lull it into capture. These reading silenced the shrieking of the heart but at the same time sent it circling wider and higher as it began now to seek its escape.

Then there was a knock on the door and PK ran to it quickly. When he returned it was with his friend G-Force. Apparently when the mechanical bird wrote/shat out its cry for help it appeared as text messages to all of Vice's friends near and far. In G-Force's hands she held a battered top that Vice had worn on the set of his last shoot. It was for a character he had invented in a story that with his friends he had been filming at the Goat Factory.

"Come home now." G-Force said holding the overturned top hat up and the mechanical bird that was Vice's heart soared down into its depths where it seemingly vanished. Then quick as a blink she flipped the hat over and tucked it over Vice's crown.

He blinked once. Twice. Looked around after a shake of the head and gave the order for us to get out of here.

And later at Vice's pad, the Kid and I sat drinking beers with him. He was alive talking about the wild days of Terminus theatre, controlled behind the scenes (literally, figuratively both) by feral artists and bohemian con-men. There was nothing like it and he reckoned there wouldn't be again. The city, the scene, or the people that made it happen.

It was true, but what also true was that it was late, the Kid and I were exhausted so we made our farewells. Vice walked us to the door, the mechanical bird that was his heart pounding wings of fierce mirth and unflappable misery. When he shut the door behind us I heard him laugh once politely before the Kid and I made our way into a city that will one day soon be no different from yours.

Strange when I left for work this morning Mister Spock was still alive and the last corner of Virginia-Highlands not designated a douchebag housing zone was still in business. But that's the way the world works. If you're feeling bad though, just remember a good chunk of you are reading this where such things, instead of say contracting Ebola or the attention of ISIL, is considered a bad day.

But alas, Leonard Nimoy is not just an actor from a distant age called TV, but rather has become a late 20th century western world archetype of Apollonian reason. His character on Star Trek served as a psychopomp to a prospective humanity as it voyaged from petty tribalism into space faring voyagers. What people find themselves reacting to (it seems to me) is the death of not just what appears to be a genuine nice guy who was blessed with right combination of work, will and luck, but a symbol of adventurous logic.

On the other hand, the word is that a beloved watering hole of not just our city's bohemian theatre/lit scene but the unofficial headquarters of its Democratic Party is going to be shut down to make way for yet another duplex town-home/condo with a FroYo and some sort of Tapas bar no doubt.

Well, that's how life in the 21st century works. The decades long cultural phenomena of white-flight, where middle-class working families moved out of the cities to the suburbs, ended. A new cultural paradigm emerged, the 90s dream of telecommuting (where middle class office jobs were going to be performed at home) became outsourcing instead. Eventually, a dwindling middle class found it cheaper to live in the city again or found themselves tired of living in a cultural void. So back to the city they've come and all those ghettos the hipsters made 'artsy' are now prospective properties to be developed. And hey, it's not like the developers will have to pay much in taxes or use any of their profits to say improve (or expand) the roads and utilities that will be needed to absorb the population of a small town into a one block area.

Yet, it's not the death of a dream my fellow artists, because if folks could produce works of beauty and truth through the darkest ages of mankind, then believe me when I say we (by which I mean our works) will rise over the cookie-cutter architecture and the cult of mediocrity it houses.

Resurgens, mother-fuckers, a thousand town homes won't stop me from writing the next book or seeing your next play. Every drop of magic this city bulldozes, I will return a thousand fold across the page.

What will you do?

Anyway, that's my Friday night rant I guess, let me end this with this, perhaps Mister Nimoy's finest work:

http://youtu.be/AGF5ROpjRAU